Season's Greetings

Very last-minute shopping?
1950's printed fabric for sale here and it's only $50.

The Design Centre

Swatch cards for online research through The Design Centre at Philadelphia University

via TextileNerd

Cora Ginsberg Gallery

1880's printed summer muslin, a detail from a costume for sale at Cora Ginsberg. 

Catalogues from previous years which are available online as downloads contain some great reference material.

1950's Printed Cotton Details

Spoonflower

Katy sent me a link to Spoonflower this week, these are a selection of the designs they have for show and tell purposes which are also for sale, click on the images to take you to more of each designer's work.

Spoonflower is a really easy way to have your own design digitally printed onto cotton at a very reasonable price.
Natural fibre fabrics are printed using eco-friendly, water-based pigment inks. You simply upload your design, even order a sample swatch, and that's it, posted to you in about three weeks.

Cutting out the setting up costs which are normal in printworks and honing down the techniques on offer to one process, they seem to have been able to crack it on prices. Really tempting for crafting projects, the process means even photographic designs, like the bark above, can be printed and being able to use your own print design for a textile project becomes available to everyone, which is brilliant.

It's a pity no-one's doing it over here, the shipping from the States possibly cancels out the green qualities of the clean inks and natural cottons.

Katazome

Cotton printed using the katazome technique where rice paste is pressed through stencils to create a resist then the fabric is dipped in dye, usually Indigo or kakishibu.

I didn't notice any cracking as you would see in batik, a similar process, perhaps the rice paste stays flexible?

There are some good notes on the history of Japanese stenciling here, read how human hair was once used to secure intricate, fragile parts of a stencil - typical Japanese attention to detail and problem solving.

Japanese Prints # 1

A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Print

Fantastic print, courtesy of Helen Jerome.

1920's Spots Swatches

Russian Hearts

Aprons; a constant source of excellent condition pattern samples.

Sackcloth Themed Searches

This sugarsack dress is on a plantation worker in Puerto Rico . I absolutely love it. The find, in the Library of Congress, prompted me to get lost on an online search of sackcloth clothing, some results are here.



Having often found myself looking at the amazing array of 1930's and 40's prints available to buy on American textile sites, I was regularly frustrated at the size of the bits available, some of this is due to the US tradition of quilting but the size of a sack of grain is responsible for a lot of what's out there for sale.
After the bottom fell out of the cotton market due to the arrival of cheap man-made fabrics such as Rayon in the 1920's, many grain companies started using this newly cheap cotton for their feed sacks. They realised how popular this cotton was with women who were using the cloths in a Make Do and Mend spirit, re-using the sacks and making clothes and quilts.

By the late 1930s there was strong competition to produce the most attractive prints. Artists were hired as this turned out to be a great marketing ploy. Women picked out flour, sugar, beans, rice, cornmeal and the feed and fertilizer for the family farm based on which fabrics they desired.

These are some examples of the prints.

I LOVE RED

Some prints from the 'reds' box in my studio

This is a detail on a 1960's dress.

I'll use the fabric one day. I would love to use the dress itself but it's tiny, virtually child-size.

There's always that dilemma when unpicking a garment to use the fabric, but if it's not otherwise able to be used and therefore never seen then I think it's justified? At least it's being used for the intended purpose and has a long life if it's seen on film.

Silk Ribbon, 5' wide. I'm guessing late Victorian?

I must take more photographs, there are so many good prints to share.